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Wednesday, January 22, 2014

5 Reason to Watch Gophers-Badgers Tonight

The Gophers take on the hated Badgers tonight at 8 on Big Ten Network. These games are always entertaining, no matter how much Bo's bunch tries to slow it down and make the game as insufferable as possible. Here's 5 reasons to watch tonight.

Elliott Eliason—EE is everything I have ever loved in a basketball player. He’s a big dopey white guy who doesn’t have
an ounce of muscle on his body. I’m
pretty sure Jay Bilas would piss his gym shorts if you asked him about Eliason’s
explosivity or second-jumpability (side note: Bilas deserves a ton of credit
for covering the draft with fucking made
up words. Serioulsy both of those
words are underlined in red). Eliason is
basically only a competent Big Ten basketball player because he’s fucking tall
and he tries hard and I absolutely love
it. My favorite moment of last year was
when Eliason came off the bench and scored on a fadeaway jump-hook against then-#1 Indiana at the Barn, and then
raced down the court throwing his hands in the air to tell the crowd to go
fucking nuts (as if they didn’t already know).
How can you not love a guy who plays basketball like a 6’4’’ 8th
grader playing against a bunch of kids who have barely hit puberty with an 8th
grader’s enthusiasm? EE is (as the
bro-iest hockey player would say) a beauty.

Bo Ryan—People
who know me know one of my favorite things to do is to hate. I probably say hate more often than anyone I know. And I HATE Bo Ryan. The guy is just such a tremendous asshole out
there. He’s always scowling, prancing up
and down the sidelines like Jim Harbaugh.
What makes it even worse is that goddamn announcers act like he’s Coach
K or John Wooden too. Last year when the
Gopher lost to UW in Madison, the announcer (I don’t remember who it was) was
telling a story about how players checking in have to hand a towel to the
player they’re going in for so that player will know to come off the court, and
he was fucking praising him like goddamn Albert Einstein that he found such an
innovative way to make sure he has only 5 guys on the court at once. Read that back a second time because it is
absolutely preposterous. On top of that,
he has built his team traditionally on mediocre offense and lockdown defense,
which translates to a fucking lot of Badger wins 48-43 over Purdue or
Northwestern and a lot of zzzzzzzzz’s for fans.
God I hate him, I hope he falls off the raised court tonight.

Andre Hollins—Dre
is having a great junior year so far and he usually comes to play in
a big way in big games. He’s averaging
16 a game so far this year on 41% shooting (which admittedly isn’t very good,
but the offense really relies on him to score).
Last year against Memphis, he dropped 41. In the first round upset of 6-seeded UCLA, he
hit 5 3’s and dropped in 28 points. In the
NCAA Tourney against Florida, he scored 25 (including 6 3’s) in a loss. I remember that game—as soon as he got into
foul trouble, the Gophers were dead and Tubby was essentially fired walking off
the court. He was single-handedly keeping them afloat. He’s hopefully going to be around
for another year after this, and then I could see him working his way into an
NBA rotation after a few years as a guy you bring in for instant scoring because he can shoot a little bit and he's great at getting to the bucket and drawing fouls. Watch him tonight and as much as you can,
because he is probably the best Gopher (along with Mbakwe) since Bobby Jackson
and Voshon Leonard on the Clem Haskins Gopher teams that went to the Final
Four were on the vacated Final Four teams. Bottom line, as Dre goes, so go the Gophers, and if the
Gophers have any chance tonight, he needs to go.

Richard
Pitino—He’s only been the coach for 21 games, but it’s already pretty apparent that
he is going to be a pretty good coach for a long time. Not to be a fatalist Minnesota fan, but in
reality if it keeps going like this, he probably won’t be around for too much
longer. We are 5th in the Big
Ten (which is higher than Tubby ever finished) currently, and we’re doing so
with a pretty mediocre roster. On
one hand, we do have a few pretty good college players, albeit sometimes
inconsistent, in the Hollins brothers, EE, Lil’ Dre, and Malik Smith. But on the other hand, fucking Oto Oseniks is
a starter, Joey King gets significant minutes
off the bench, and the only backup big that is even semi-competent is Mo Walker
who made buckets in back to back trips against Ohio State last week and I reacted
by almost keeling over because I couldn’t fucking believe what I saw. So yeah, it’s not exactly a great roster. The
team makes mistakes for sure, but at least they can figure out how to get a
shot up against a zone and they’re fun to watch instead of watching Tubby’s
club last year doing 5 man hockey line changes and not knowing how to run a
good inbound play. On top of all that,
he has one of my favorite intricacies of any coach I have ever watched as when
he gets pissed off at officials, he starting ripping his clothes off. It’s hilarious to see him chuck his sport
coat into the row behind the bench. It
definitely softens the blow when EE gets called for his 4th to see Dick rip his tie off and spike it on the raised court. I've gotten more enjoyment in talking about
that than anything other than Musgrave’s tiny play card.

Malik Smith—Last
but not least, Malik Smith is just fucking fun to watch. He’s one of those college veteran guys who isn't going to the pros (at least not in a first world country) but knows what
he’s doing and has a ton of confidence in himself. He’s shooting 39% from the field overall, but
he’s shooting 40% from deep, which is completely baffling considering that he
is the ultimate irrational confidence guy and jacks up threes because there are no fours.
If you’re a bubble team like the Gophers are, you want one of
these guys. Malik goes down and hits a
30-footer from the wing two or three times in a row, and then just starts to
say “fuck it” and throws up some fucking dandy heat-check shots. I saw him hit the side of the back board from
about 3 inches in from the sideline above the break, and I wasn't even pissed
because of how many of those ridiculous shots he has hit so far. He might shoot you out of one every once in a
while, but he’ll sure as fuck shoot you into one at least once or twice this
year, like he did against Syracuse over Thanksgiving break. Hopefully he shoots
us into one tonight.